As is known in the art, traditional spacecraft are prone to many production and deployment-related problems. For example, production facilities can take many years (or even decades) to develop and deploy military and commercial spacecraft. By launch time, many spacecraft have outdated and/or are obsolete components because of technology advances during long development periods. Spacecraft are known to be vulnerable to launch failures, software engineering defects (i.e., software bugs), and component malfunctions which can further delay development and result in cost-overruns. To prevent catastrophic failures, designers build redundancy into spacecraft systems, which adds weight, space, and cost to the overall system.
As is also known in the art, military and commercial ventures, operations, and missions are highly vulnerable to loss of key spacecraft due to attack, space weather, and/or malfunction. In recent years, military and commercial industries have proposed and produced a new class of high-altitudes vehicles, so called “virtual satellites” or “pseudolites”, which are designed to be flexible, relatively low-cost, interchangeable, and reusable. Some virtual satellites are capable of rapid deployment and breakdown and may be deployed in multi-vehicle networks for a variety of military and commercial applications.
Virtual satellites offer advantages over traditional spacecraft. For example, virtual satellite vehicles can be built and launched within weeks, or even days, and technicians can rapidly assemble and deploy replacement vehicles (e.g., by using off-the-shelf components that are readily assembled from plug-and-play equipment) in response to a loss of an individual vehicles. Virtual satellites are relatively inexpensive to produce, interchangeable, and can hold different types of payloads which when combined offer more operational responsiveness and flexibility, especially when compared with the significant engineering and managerial challenges associated with multiple payloads (e.g., multiple sensing payloads a single-spacecraft having) on a single spacecraft.